Briefly Noted

Taipei, by Tao Lin (Vintage). Lin’s third novel chronicles the life of Paul, a twenty-six-year-old writer who spends a lot of time promoting his new book and doing drugs, sometimes simultaneously. He meets a girl named Erin, marries her in Las Vegas, and brings her to meet his parents, in Taipei, where they do MDMA and LSD and narrate their experience into a laptop. The novel is unique in its relentless accumulation of logistical details—“Paul first learned of Erin twenty months ago, in January 2009, when she commented on his blog and he clicked her profile and read her pensive, melancholy, amusing anecdotes, on her blog, of her vague relationships.” Lin is accurate about the tedium and claustrophobia of being young and artistic, but for the most part he doesn’t convert this into insight. Instead, there’s a retreat into hazy philosophy, as when Paul reflects that “technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness.”

My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain, by Patricio Pron, translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem (Knopf). After years in Germany, the narrator of Pron’s enthralling novel returns to Argentina when his father is hospitalized. Restless at home, he digs through his father’s belongings, coming upon a file that contains news clippings chronicling the recent disappearance of a man he’s never heard of and, thirty years earlier, the man’s sister. Pron writes in a first-person voice that feels more confessional than fictional. As the narrator pieces together his parents’ leftist activities during the dictatorship, we witness the unravelling of family and nation, and the burden of knowledge that results. “Children are detectives of their parents,” Pron writes, “who cast them out into the world so that one day the children will return and tell them their story so that they themselves can understand it.”

Wild Ones, by Jon Mooallem (Penguin). “Why are we drawn to certain wild animals and not others?” Mooallem asks, in this insightful and often funny examination of the intersection of science, environmental activism, and popular culture. The book focusses on efforts to preserve three threatened or endangered species—the polar bear, the Lange’s metalmark butterfly, and the whooping crane. Bears are airlifted away from populated areas, plants are killed to protect butterflies, and people use ultralight aircraft to teach young cranes to migrate. “We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic,” Mooallem writes, expressing ambivalence about much of what he sees. Yet, as he shows, even the most absurd-seeming attempts at conservation are examples of “the beauty of humans trying to fix a larger beauty we broke.”

Bough Down, by Karen Green (Siglio). Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protracted, grief abraded all intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir. Green, an artist, was the wife of David Foster Wallace, whom she met in 2002, just after he moved to Southern California. Through her, he hoped to conclude his long bachelorhood, and when he hanged himself, five years ago, he left a predictably vast hole. “I worry that I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down,” she writes. “I keep hearing that sound.” And “I want him pissed off at politicians, ill at ease, trying to manipulate me into doing favors for him I would do anyway. . . . I don’t want him at peace.” The book intersperses its vignettes with tiny sepia collages of text, fingerprints, and crime-scene-like shots that function as peepholes into grief. The result would be too painful if not for its insistence on humor as a palliative. Green has the eye of a novelist and, like her late husband, rejects the easy ending. She writes, “Ultimately, the loss becomes immortal and hole is more familiar than tooth.”

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